While Republicans were watching the election returns from the presidential primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland, and the District of Columbia on Tuesday night, about two dozen Virginia Libertarians gathered in Chantilly for a meet-and-greet with presidential candidate Gary Johnson.
Johnson, a former two-term governor of New Mexico, started the 2012 campaign as a Republican, but his exclusion from the pre-primary debates (he was invited to just two of them) frustrated him, as one might expect. Eventually he dropped out of the GOP race and announced he would seek the nomination of the Libertarian Party.
Asked at Tuesday’s event about his party switch, Johnson assumed a Dracula-like pose, covering his face with his suit jacket as though it were a cape, and quipped that he had not really switched, but that he had been New Mexico’s Libertarian governor for eight years “in the guise of a Republican.”
As the crowd began to depart, I had a few minutes of one-on-one time with Johnson. I concluded our interview by asking him if climbing Mount Everest had prepared him for this presidential campaign. He replied:
Yes, it did. Climbing Mount Everest — athletics — for me, has taught me that life is a journey, it’s not a destination, so if you’re going to go to Mount Everest and the only thing that you’re going to be content with is summiting Mount Everest, I’ve got news for you: You’re going to be sadly disappointed.
You need to enjoy your life, you need to enjoy what it is you’re doing, so in the case of Mount Everest, you’ve got to enjoy having to hunker down for several days at a time, not being able to move.
When it comes to athletics, you actually have to enjoy training. I do. When it comes to politics, you actually have to enjoy doing this or you shouldn’t be engaged in it.
One Libertarian activist I spoke to at the event predicted that, in a field that now consists of about 9 candidates for the presidential nomination, Johnson should get about 75 percent of the delegate votes on the first ballot at the LP’s convention in Las Vegas next month.
After that, Johnson will be working to improve his name recognition so he can reach the 15 percent threshold in public opinion polls required to get an invitation to participate with the Republican and Democratic nominees in the televised presidential debates — that is, unless the presidential debate commission raises the threshold in order to exclude him. Currently, Johnson says, he is polling about 7 percent against Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.
